README file in the pope directory

We omit the tests directory from public releases to conserve bandwidth and disk space but you can find it’s Mercurial repository on bitbucket.org.

Unfortunately POPE’s unit tests are a little neglected (just ignore anything with hooks) and requires a Simpletest-Wordpress plugin that I can’t seem to find, making running them difficult anyway.

On the upside POPE is just our framework, and NextGen can be customized in many ways. What is it you are trying to customize? I can guide you towards what you need to do.

Thanks much for your reply, Benjamin. Sorry I am so long getting back to this. I missed the email that you replied to my post. I’ve never gotten a reply from my other posts for NextGEN support, so I wasn’t expecting one!

There are two customizations that I have done on my website which no longer work with the rewrite of NextGEN gallery. The first is that I created a browser to navigate my photographs. You can see how it works here: https://www.thelesters.net/tag-gallery-page/. I use the javascript library called ‘jstree’. Each node on the tree browser represents a tag in NextGEN gallery. When the user clicks on a node in the tree, I call a php that I wrote, which calls nggShowGalleryTags(). This php loads the gallery associated with the tag without re-loading the entire page. Here is the custom php code:

require('../../../../wp-config.php');

$gallery_tag = $_REQUEST['gallery_tag'] ;
$page_num = $_REQUEST['nggpage'] ;

$pp_gallery = "";

// If there's a page number, set the global variable from the next gen plug in.
// It's used in nggShowGalleryTags:
if ($page_num !== "") {
    set_query_var("nggpage",$page_num) ;
}

// This function is from next gen gallery. It creates all of the html for the
// thumbnails to show up:
$pp_gallery = nggShowGalleryTags($gallery_tag) ;

// Send the results back to the client side:
echo $pp_gallery ;

With the new version of NextGEN gallery, I get an error saying that nggShowGalleryTags() is an undefined function. About a year ago when I first tried to fix this problem I found a function in the new NextGEN called nggShowRelatedGallery() located in nextgen-gallery\products\photocrati_nextgen\modules\ngglegacy\nggfunctions.php. I tried using it and it worked, except that it didn’t do any pagination of the photo thumbnails. For example, with the old version if I select a gallery with more than N thumbnails (e.g. click on ‘Bird Favorites’), then it only sends N, and provides a means to select the next page. I see now that nggShowRelatedGallery() is located in a different location/file (photocrati_nextgen\modules\nextgen_gallery_display\module.nextgen_gallery_display.php), but I haven’t tried using it again yet. I assume there will be no change from the last time.

The second NextGEN customization on my website is that I have a custom caption on the bottom of the photographs. In addition to some information about the photo from the metadata associated with the photo, I display the ‘crop factor’, which is computed by some custom calculations based on the ‘user comment’ metadata that I update in Lightroom.

Here is what I did in the old NextGEN version. I created a child theme (the parent theme is Thematic), which I called clearcreek. I copied gallery.php from nextgen-gallery/view to the new directory in my theme. I then edited gallery.php. There is a loop there that goes through all the images. For each image in the loop I added code to create a string (called $text_display) based on metadata, and calculations from metadata. I then use $text_display instead of $image->description for the photo description.

I tried using the template approach (e.g. [ nggallery id=5 template=<templatename> ]. The problem is that it doesn’t work for albums, and I use albums in my posts. So I resorted to modifying gallery.php in my theme.

On the new version of NextGEN gallery, when I follow the procedure of copying gallery.php and modifying it, it doesn’t work at all. The description on my photos isn’t updated.

I am not an experienced web developer. I read some books, and then learned by doing. I’m likely doing some goofy things. I am familiar with computer programming (a lot of experience in C++).

I’m nervous about sticking with the old version of NextGEN gallery. I thought that if I learned Pope I might be able update my NextGEN version, and do my customizations the ‘right’ way. The only other option is to find a new photograph management plugin (e.g NextCellent or MaxGalleria), but I like NextGEN, and would rather continue with it. I would greatly appreciate any help you can provide.

nggShowGalleryTags() was indeed deprecated as a method when we launched NextGen 2.0. You can replace it with the following shortcode [ngg_images source='tags' container_ids='motorrad' display_type='photocrati-nextgen_basic_thumbnails'] or do_shortcode("[ngg_images source='tags' container_ids='motorrad' display_type='photocrati-nextgen_basic_thumbnails']");

We still support custom templates from 1.9; you shouldn’t need to change anything with them. We look for custom templates (in order) in the child theme (from get_stylesheet_directory()), the parent theme (get_template_directory()), the examples from ngglegacy/view/, and WP_CONTENT_DIR/ngg/legacy/templates/

It is possible that NextGen would use our example template first because it named “gallery.php” if yours is also named the same. Try renaming your template to “gallery-custom.php” – that ought to fix your problem.

Thanks for your response, Benjamin. Unfortunately, unless I misunderstand, it doesn’t address my issues.

For the customization I made to add the photo browser, you suggested using a shortcode. I don’t understand this solution. Is there some way for me to use a shortcode in my PHP code? As I said in my description, and tried to illustrate with the code sample, I need to create the tag gallery dynamically under program control. When the user clicks on a node on the browser tree (created using the jstree library), a javascript function is called. This function then calls a php which runs on the server and returns the html that will be displayed. Following is the javascript code:

jQuery("#tgp2_pictures_div").load(php_string,{"gallery_tag": gallery_tag},tgp2_ProcessThumbGet) ;

‘php_string’ is the URL to the PHP that I showed in my previous post. So this loads the output of the php (the tag gallery in the last ‘echo’ statement in the PHP code I showed) into the HTML element ‘tgp2_pictures_div’.

Since nggShowGalleryTags not longer exists, how can I do this now?

For the custom description text, you said that the custom template works the same as in 1.9. But as I tried to describe in my post, the custom template solution doesn’t work for albums. This is true also for 1.9. I tried many things to make it work for albums, but finally gave up, and went to the solution that I mentioned (i.e. I used gallery.php rather than gallery-custom.php). This work-a-round from 1.9 no longer works in the new NextGEN versions. Can you suggest a solution where I could create custom text based on the photograph’s metadata (note that I must derive new values based on calculations using the photograph’s metadata) that would work on albums as well as ‘regular’ galleries?

Any suggestions are appreciated.

You can use WordPress’ method do_shortcode() to return the results of a shortcode, thus in PHP you could do: $galleryHTML = do_shortcode("[ngg_images source='tags' container_ids='motorrad' display_type='photocrati-nextgen_basic_thumbnails']");

What are you naming your album template files?

Very cool about ‘do_shortcode()’. I should have known ?? I can’t wait to try it, but I anticipate a problem. I assume the ‘do_shortcode()’ will provide the required pagination when needed (e.g. when the number of thumbnails is above a threshold). But how do I make a call to load each page? In my current solution, if the user clicks on a page number, or clicks ‘next’ or ‘prev’, then I call the same PHP, but with updated page numbers (in the PHP I provided you can see that I pass the page number and get it in $page_num, and set it with ‘set_query_var()’). Can I specify in the shortcode which page numbers to show? By the way I’ll add a detail that may be tangential. To make the page navigation work, I wrote javascript code that massaged some of the ‘default’ HTML navigation that was returned from NextGEN with my own HTML that calls the PHP code to load the new gallery without re-loading the entire page.

Also, how do I specify with the shortcode how many thumbnails per page? Or maybe there is a different function call I can use to do this?

Regarding your question about the ‘album template files’, I’m not sure I understand. For my work-a-round, I just copied over gallery.php and modified it, and it worked for all photos, including albums i.e. I left the name as gallery.php. When I was trying the custom template approach, I did the following. I have a theme I wrote called ‘clearcreek’. I copied gallery.php and renamed it to gallery-clearcreek.php, and added my customization to that. Then in the short code, I put template=clearcreek. As I mentioned, I could never get this to work for albums.

Thanks!

I tried the suggestion to replace my call to nggShowGalleryTags() with do_shortcode(). Here is the code:

require('../../../../wp-config.php');

$gallery_tag = $_REQUEST['gallery_tag'] ;
$page_num = $_REQUEST['nggpage'] ;

$pp_gallery = "";

// If there's a page number, set the global variable from the next gen plug in.
// It's used in nggShowGalleryTags:
if ($page_num !== "") {
    set_query_var("nggpage",$page_num) ;
}

// This function is from next gen gallery. It creates all of the html for the
// thumbnails to show up:
//$pp_gallery = nggShowGalleryTags($gallery_tag) ;
$pp_gallery = do_shortcode("[ngg_images tag_ids='$gallery_tag' container_ids='motorrad' display_type='photocrati-nextgen_basic_thumbnails']") ;

// Send the results back to the client side:
echo $pp_gallery ;

I had to modify Benjamin’s suggested code slightly by replacing source=’tags’ with tag_ids=’tags’, where ‘tags’ is the tag I want for the gallery e.g. tag_ids=’cormorants’.

The results were not very good. Here are the problems:

1. The pagination doesn’t work. The do_shortcode() returns navigation buttons, but they don’t point to a valid page. For example, href=/nggallery/page/2. When I use the shortcode on a post, the navigation points a valid page such as href = /localhost/thelestersnet/2015/tag-gallery-experiment/nggallery/page/2. I tried using my old design where I replace the href so that it calls my php code. This shows the thumbnails, but it doesn’t change the page i.e. it always shows the thumbnails of the first page.

Is there a way I can call do_shortcode() (or some other function) so that it returns the proper page? e.g. In the old NextGEN version I called set_query_var(“nggpage”,$page_num) ;, but this doesn’t work anymore with the new version of NextGEN.

2. The thumbnails were returned and displayed, including the page navigation, but there was no formatting. There was a single long column of photos; the thumbnails have no border; the page navigation is crammed over to the left hand side. The formatting works for posts that use the shortcode, and the formatting was good on the old version of NextGEN Gallery where I called nggShowGalleryTags().

Any idea what I need to do to fix the formatting? e.g. is there a CSS file I am missing that I need to load in my theme? (I don’t know why this would be, since it works for posts, and it worked in the old version of NextGEN).

Thanks again for your help.

Check out the file nextgen-gallery/products/photocrati_nextgen/modules/nextgen_basic_gallery/adapter.nextgen_basic_thumbnails_controller.php and its index_method() action. If you set $_REQUEST[‘ajax_pagination_referrer’] you can control how pagination urls work.

You can use the parameter images_per_page in the shortcode to control that setting with the basic thumbnails.